The Waste Lands (Page 33)

The Piper School, his father had explained to him the summer before (the Bicentennial Summer, that had been—all bunting and flags and New York Harbor filled with Tall Ships), was, quite simply, The Best Damned School In The Country For A Boy Your Age. The fact that Jake had been accepted there had nothing to do with money, Elmer Chambers explained . . . almost insisted. He had been savagely proud of this fact, although, even at ten, Jake had suspected it might not be a true fact, that it might really be a bunch of bullshit his father had turned into a fact so he could casually drop it into the conversation at lunch or over cocktails: My kid? Oh, he’s going to Piper. Best Damned School In The Country For A Boy His Age. Money won’t buy you into that school, you know; for Piper, it’s brains or nothing. Jake was perfectly aware that in the fierce furnace of Elmer Cham-bers’s mind, the gross carbon of wish and opinion was often blasted into the hard diamonds which he called facts. … or, in more informal circumstances, “factoids.” His favorite phrase, spoken often and with rev-erence, was the fact is, and he used it every chance he got.

The fact is, money doesn’t get anyone into The Piper School, his father had told him during that Bicentennial Summer, the summer of blue skies and bunting and Tall Ships, a summer which seemed golden in Jake’s mem-ory because he had not yet begun to lose his mind and all he had to worry about was whether or not he could cut the mustard at The Piper School, which sounded like a nest for newly hatched geniuses. The only thing that gets you into a place like Piper is what you’ve got up here. Elmer Chambers had reached over his desk and tapped the center of his son’s forehead with a hard, nicotine-stained finger. Get me, kid? Jake had nodded. It wasn’t necessary to talk to his father, because his father treated everyone—including his wife—the way he treated his underlings at the TV network where he was in charge of programming and an acknowledged master of The

Kill. All you had to do was listen, nod in the right places, and after a while he let you go.

Good, his father said, lighting one of the eighty Camel cigarettes he smoked each and every day. We understand each other, then. You’re going to have to work your buttsky off, but you can cut it. They never would have sent us this if you couldn’t. He picked up the letter of acceptance from The Piper School and rattled it. There was a kind of savage triumph in the gesture, as if the letter was an animal he had killed in the jungle, an animal he would now skin and eat. So work hard. Make your grades. Make your mother and me proud of you. If you end the year with an A average in your courses. there’s a trip to Disney World in it for you. That’s something to shoot for, right, kiddo? Jake had made his grades—A’s in everything (until the last three weeks, that was). He had, presumably, made his mother and father proud of him, although they were around so little that it was hard to tell. Usually there was nobody around when he came home from school except for Greta Shaw—the housekeeper—and so he ended up showing his A papers to her. After that, they migrated to a dark corner of his room. Sometimes Jake looked through them and wondered if they meant any-thing. He wanted them to, but he had serious doubts. Jake didn’t think he would be going to Disney World this summer, A average or no A average.

He thought the nuthouse was a much better possibility. As he walked in through the double doors of The Piper School at 8:45 on the morning of May 31st, a terrible vision came to him. He saw his father in his office at 70 Rockefeller Plaza, leaning over his desk with a Camel jutting from the corner of his mouth, talking to one of his underlings as blue smoke wreathed his head. All of New York was spread out behind and below his father, its thump and hustle silenced by two layers of Thermopane glass. The fact is, money doesn’t get anyone into Sunnyvale Sanitarium, his father was telling the underling in a tone of grim satisfaction. He reached out and tapped the underling’s forehead. The only thing that gets you into a place like that is when something big-time goes wrong up here in the attic. That’s what happened to the kid. But he’s working his goddam buttsky off. Makes the best f**king baskets in the place, they tell me. And when they let him out—if they ever do—there’s a trip in it for him. A trip to—

“—the way station,” Jake muttered, then touched his forehead with a hand that wanted to tremble. The voices were coming back. The yelling, conflicting voices which were driving him mad.

You’re dead, Jake. You were run over by a car and you’re dead. Don’t be stupid! Look—see that poster? REMEMBER THE CLASS ONE PICNIC, it says. Do you think they have Class Picnics in the afterlife? I don’t know. But I know you were run over by a car. No!

Yes. It happened on May 9th, at 8:25 AM You died less than a minute later. No! No! No!

“John?”

He looked around, badly startled. Mr. Bissette, his French teacher, was standing there, looking a little concerned. Behind him, the rest of the student body was streaming into the Common Room for the morning assembly. There was very little skylarking, and no yelling at all. Presumably these other students, like Jake himself, had been told by their parents how lucky they were to be attending Piper, where money didn’t matter (although tuition was $22,000 a year), only your brains. Presumably many of them had been promised trips this summer if their grades were good enough. Presumably the parents of the lucky trip-winners would even go along in some cases. Presumably— “John, are you okay?” Mr. Bissette asked. “Sure,” Jake said. “Fine. I overslept a little this morning. Not awake yet, I guess.”